


coroner's gambit

by canto



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M, POV Second Person, elias's homoerotic affair with the lonely, gratuitous use of repetition and em dashes with very dubious grounds in grammar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:20:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29265675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canto/pseuds/canto
Summary: you're elias bouchard, except not at all, but when has that ever mattered?(or: identity issues in the time of apocalypse.)
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	coroner's gambit

**Author's Note:**

> my hobbies include walking around with a picture of elias that's captioned "HAVE YOU SEEN MY WIFE? NOW YOU HAVE :)". you're welcome ig. i wrote this right after mag192 but it fits well enough with mag193 that fuck you
> 
> cw for something like general unreality lack of identity and the vague sense of blasphemy

the story goes something like this.

eons ago, all you were was elias bouchard, nothing but moth drawn to flame until the flame burns your eyes right out. but then again, that's the wrong god to pray to. 

you would know all about that, wouldn't you? 

eons ago, you were never elias bouchard, and so you passed the accretion disc right into that event horizon. it's peaceful while it lasts, really.   
by now, you are more _is-not_ -never-was rather than _is_ -always-will-be. and at what point does the idea of self-hood become identified? it’s such an ambiguous concept, you don't _know_ , you can’t ever possibly know.   
it's intoxicating, not knowing something for once.

(you are god, for you describe and shape and speak the limitation of human fear. _your guts are getting all cloyed up again, darling_.)

crawl through that maudlin wasteland until it burns to move any further crawl through it until there’s nowhere else to go crawl crawl and god you're so 

so

so fucking lonely

—butyou'reneveraloneagainiamapartofyouiwillalwaysbewithyouandiwillalwasbeyou—

you contemplate what it means to feel loss. you have all the time in the world for that now.   
it's there for the split second of pause in-between where the fear and the ego resides, the space between something where there is nothing.   
you watch the sun fuse all over again and again and again and it reeks of tungsten and white-hot filament and you _remember_ remember that you were not always this and 

you see everything and everything isn't now and will be because everything is also was and will never be again and

and you

  
remember. 

(above all, you are so so human, for the fear is yours it's all yours yours always yours and _did you know that it's the human parts that make you so repulsive, dearest?_ )

he was right, of course. how convenient he can't ever find out you ended up agreeing with him. and isn’t that funny? _you_ , glad that someone doesn’t _know—_?  
because that’s the thing: it’s nothing but a unique form of cruelty to still have a consciousness at this point. there’s still a part of you that can consider not Knowing, which was never really an option, but entertaining it feels like flirting with danger and you were never one to look away from a disaster. so just this once (twice, thrice) you allow yourself to think of a lifespan where you never allowed yourself to become so entangled in someone else, neither knowing where they begin or end.

you were never elias bouchard, but there was something so utterly magnetic in how you could see your own loneliness reflected right back at you to the point that you claimed him as the next vessel for the king of kings of this nuclear waste of an imitation of a life, not stopping to pick up the pieces of your self too scattered to ever put back together. decades centuries millennia eons later the eye fuses you right back in a clumsy attempt at a lifeform and you—

_—he’s gone._

(and you take your first breath.)

**Author's Note:**

> wifey


End file.
